I hope you’ve seen the new Project-Haystack Connections
ezine for Spring 2016. Here’s a link.
Project-Haystack is certainly
growing in strength as an open-source software organization as it
advances the technology of semantic tagging and data modeling for smart
devices, buildings, energy systems and the general Internet of Things.
The new ezine was launched with the mindset of informing and delighting
smart building app developers. Under that umbrella I’m
referencing not just the traditional building controls systems
integration professionals, but all the energy and sustainability
managers, facilities and property managers, MEP system design
engineers, building equipment product management teams, utility account
managers, etc. that are starting to wrangle with BMS, lighting, fire
and security, access control, and other building operational data.
Actually, the Project-Haystack app development network is even bigger
than the Smart Buildings world. Haystack tags and data modeling
technology can also be deployed to bring contextual data about the
built environment into a healthcare app, an automotive app, a smart
grid app etc.

More
and more, we are an industry of software developers selling to other
software developers as adoption of mobile app and Internet of Things
concepts grow. Here’s an article by a marketing company that
conducted a detailed study of developers, as a target audience. To
summarize this piece, developers care first about understanding the
technology, so provide them with content that is full of useful
resources and links. I think we achieved that goal with this first
issue. There is a stereotype from the past of a briefcase-wielding
salesperson knocking on the door of the more traditional IT buyer. That
was the start of a relationship fueled on high-gloss marketing
materials, lunches, ROI calculations, dinners, co-written RFPs,
ringside seats to sports events, champagne toasts after proposal
submissions, and eventually a sale. The building controls software
industry never fit this stereotype and our world converged with
enterprise IT just as that whole paradigm was imploding with cloud apps
and ’the as a service’ model gaining acceptance. So we missed
that : (

Today,
more direct and educational marketing tools like our ezine are
preferred by developers and are best-practice for selling software and
services across the board. Another factor that shouldn’t be
missed is the role of the open source movement in marketing and sales.
While open-source developers are first motivated by a desire to deeply
understand a new technology, other outcomes are also often achieved.
Open source communities regularly give birth to multiple commercial
professional service and product companies. Consider all the companies
that started within the .NET Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the
Linux Foundation, etc. Developers that participate in open-source
communities benefit from the opportunity to ‘try before you
buy.’ In this way, open source becomes a vector into the
buying process. Participation in an open-source community can give you
an early customer base, it builds credibility. Project-Haystack
is not our industry’s only open source community. There is Sedona and
there are many communities gathered around the Open Data movement and
Internet of Things and Machine-to-Machine messaging.

I greatly appreciate the Project-Haystack members and supporters that contributed content to this first issue of Project-Haystack Connections,
a few who enlisted my help in getting some great thought-leadership
articles and customer stories written up and pre-published at sites
like automatedbuildings.com and ASHRAE Journal. Many more of you said
your stories were just not ready to tell yet or that you were too busy.
I hope you’ll all contact me soon so that you will be in Issue 02 of
Connections. More than that, I hope that the new ezine and the more
recently published CABA white paper on Project-Haystack encourage you
to join the organization if you haven’t yet. Some of the community are
gathering at the Continental Automated Buildings Association
Intelligent Buildings & Digital Home Forum coming up April 26 - 28,
2016 in San Diego, CA. You can meet them face to face there. Most
importantly, budget and plan for open-source participation in your
marketing mix. As we move into a time when data wranglers and app
developers are on both the buy and sell sides of any business, it could
be the most important marketing you do.